Helping him be Quiet
by Hatteress
Summary: Spike is falling into a darkness created by his soul and manipulated by the first; when Buffy won't help him be quiet he has no other option but to waste away…..right? Dawn has other ideas. vague Dawn/Spike


TITLE: Helping him be Quiet  
  
RATING: PG-15 at the moment - may go up  
  
DISCLAIMER: They're mine! Mine I tell you!...Oh look, a pig flying...  
  
SUMMARY: Spike is falling into a darkness created by his soul and manipulated by the first; when Buffy won't help him be quiet he has no other option but to waste away...right? Dawn has other ideas.  
  
AUTHORS NOTES: Yep, you guessed it. A Spike/Dawner and one of my first too. Let me know what you think. Set after 'Help' (ie: the one with Cassie and her heart-attack at 16 years of age)  
  
******************** PART ONE: Words and Cuts ******************  
  
Words could be painful. They could burn and cut through defenses, leaving their victim naked and bleeding; facing an uncaring world. The simple act of saying; of speaking is held with such nonchalant esteem; used and abused to maim and hurt with abandon. But many forget that it takes one to listen for the words to take effect; words need to be heard for the pain to be felt. Sometimes those words that are heard the clearest are the most cutting; breaking the skin of the defenses as a sharpened blade would the artery of a traveler seeking abandon. But then there are other times; times when the words not heard but known to be there are the most agonizing; that cut the deepest.  
  
Dawn was fast learning just how much one could bleed when struck with such words.  
  
She stumbled slightly, her feet carrying her heedlessly along the corridor, her balance scarcely kept by the hand trailing across the lockers. She was running blind; unwilling to see rather than not being able to, her direction; she just needed to get away from them; away from the whispers; away from the accusations. This was Sunnydale; you would have thought its high-schoolers would have been used to deaths in their numbers by now but, as Dawn had discovered the hard way; a natural death in their ranks seemed to peak their interest like no other. Cassie had died of a heart attack...granted, not all that normal for a sixteen year old girl but in Sunnydale? Cassie's death was downright boring by normal standards and yet the student body was acting as though they were Scotland Yard incarnate; dissecting and piecing together the girl they had all seen as a freak.  
  
They just couldn't seem to accept the fact that one of their fellow class- mates had died a perfectly explainable, though understandably tragic death. Fingers were being pointed with malicious abandon at all and sunder who may have been involved, miraculously and ironically missing that gang that had attempted to sacrifice Cassie the very night of her death. The air was thick with theories; many of them based around a single fact that seemed to damn Dawn into the ground:  
  
Cassie had died in her sister's arms.  
  
The whispers, curious glances in the halls, all out accusing stares; all served to drill Dawn's already low spirits into salted earth. And so she was searching for an escape; anywhere to hide from the words; anywhere to hide from everything...because who knew who else would die next.  
  
Her hand hit a door knob.  
  
Dawn stopped short, her wrist jarring against the wooden panel as she looked up through bleary eyes at the sign on the door:  
  
Basement Access - No Student entry  
  
No student entry; yet another rule she was about to break.  
  
The stairs were dark and musty, the smell of oil and old motor-mechanics invading her nostrils as she descended into the darkness. The air was heavy with silence though it wasn't complete, just seemingly waiting; biding it's time before the screams and the pain. Sunnydale High school's basement was not a happy place; but then neither was she at the moment; Dawn rather thought they were suited to each other.  
  
Dawn allowed her eyes to scan the depths of the underground maze of rooms; marveling at their utter uselessness. No body came down here, she knew; even the smokers were compelled to seek out a different place to obtain their daily nicotine hit. There was simply something hokey about the basement; something that told something deep in people that they would much rather be above the darkened rooms rather than in them. No one could ever explain the feeling, or its cause; Dawn found she could rather easily: The Hellmouth. If her calculations were correct it was somewhere to her right; right under the principal's office, all ready to spout demons and monsters and fulfill every student's dream of a bloody death for good old Principal Wood...or, considering her proximity, her.  
  
Dawn shrugged; oh well, demons and monsters she could take; gossiping snipe- queens she could not. With a stealth bred into her from a young age she moved into the musty silence, keeping alert for any signs of movement while also searching for somewhere to crawl into and hide; it was rather an accomplishment, being so cowardly and yet so determined at the same time...  
  
Determination; a noble characteristic of the Summers women, or so she had been told. Something to aspire to; to strive towards; a goal; and here she found herself possessing it...to hide. Dawn emerged into an open area scattered liberally with crates and dust, the shadows themselves casting a new world. The darkness strained with the silence; anticipating...what, Dawn couldn't fathom; but it waited, with relish, for the action unspoken.  
  
A rat suddenly streaked across her path, which, in itself would not have bothered her, if not for the snarling vampire scrabbling after it.  
  
Dawn gasped mightily and stumbled backwards into a tarp-covered box of something, raising a cloud of dust and mites upon contact; she didn't even blink, to horrifyingly enthralled by the monster in front of her...the very familiar monster. She watched wide-eyed as Spike snarled and dived across the floor to pin the rat to the concrete with an odd squishing noise. No sooner was the rat trapped, the vampire raised it up to his lips and Dawn only just turned away before a crunch resounded through the darkness and a greedy slurping assaulted her ears, making her stomach roll like a hyperactive dog. Dawn swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut as she tried in vain to block out the sounds of Spike feeding on the rodent; a light growling and grunting signaling just how much the blood was appreciated. Dawn was busy thanking the Gods that she hadn't had breakfast.  
  
It was her closed eyes she was sure; her effort to block out the surrounding world closing her instincts to the movement around her; it made her venerable and, as she learned thoroughly, jumpy. She couldn't help the small shriek that escaped her lips at the feel of the fingers pawing her jean-clad leg and she fell backwards automatically, loosing grip on the crate she was leaning on and landing unceremoniously on the floor in a cloud of dust. Her vision adjusted readily to her new position and she looked up in time to see Spike recoil like he'd been burned, scrabbling with the concrete and tarp for a moment before whisking away into the darkness on all fours, whimpering low in his throat.  
  
She didn't know what made her do it; ordinarily she was the one with the wish to live rather than the opposite and in just this type of situation she would have been the more vehement voter for getting the hell out of the damn basement; but there was something holding her. That same something caused her to shift to her feet and, straining her senses, start of into the darkness, following the path of the wild vampire. Surprisingly, considering a master vampire's ideal for stealth, it didn't take her long to find him, though, when she did, she wondered if it was really the same man. This couldn't be Spike; not her companion and confidant of so long; not the monster who claimed to love her sister; certainly not the Spike that had attempted to rape Buffy in their own house...  
  
It simply couldn't be; the Spike she knew would never be caught dead eating rats, with mussed hair and...lord forbid...without his beloved leather duster. It was all kind of surreal. Dawn approached the vampire like one would approach a firework that hadn't gone off when lit, cautious of any covert movement; straining for any sign of attack; but the Spike she approached seemed unable to string a coherent sentence let alone attack a curious sixteen year old sister of the slayer. Folded thoroughly in the shadows, the vampire seemed to be succeeding where Dawn herself had been failing; he was falling into himself, burying in upon himself in the hopes that he would disappear. Dawn approached his crouched figure with baited breath, half waiting for the vampire to unfold and declare it all a great joke; but he didn't, not even when she crouched before him and ducked her head to peer under the arms shielding his face. It was then that she heard his mutterings.  
  
"Hurt the girl...mustn't hurt the girl...the sun burns me; the morning...I hurt the morning."  
  
Dawn frowned uncertainly as his ramblings played havoc with her hearing, seeming to wrap around her mind and squeeze any sense that may have been taking refuge out. Her throat felt cottony and thick as she opened her mouth to speak, uncertainty tainting her words even as they passed her lips.  
  
"Spike..."  
  
Spike froze with a stillness that took Dawn aback for a moment; who knew not breathing could make such a dramatic difference to a physical halt.  
  
"Spike...are you okay?"  
  
His response was a barely-there shiver that would have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been the only movement of his taut body and Dawn felt, rather than compelled her frown to deepen. What had happened? It was a question she felt burned her more than her forgotten torment of a moment before; what had happened to change the cocky, arrogant son of a bitch she had idolized for much of her teen life into the shivering mass of nerves before her?  
  
"Spike please..."  
  
Her hand had reached up of its own accord and she jolted right along with him when it made contact with his bare shoulder, only stopped from pulling away as Spike's head lifted from his knees and his eyes made contact with hers. His eyes; that's where she saw it. There was something in his eyes beyond the pain and the confusion; something she had never seen reflected there before. She almost laughed when the word soul came to mind and pulled her eyes hastily from his gaze; only then noticing the slight trail of blood on his bottom lip. Whether it was his own or left over from his meal, Dawn didn't know and found somewhere inside herself that it didn't matter as she reached up and wiped at the scarlet with the pad of her thumb.  
  
He moved too quick for her to realize what he was doing and Dawn hissed as the cut opened on her thumb and the first drop fell onto the lip she had just wiped. She froze, whether in fear or something else, she couldn't tell as he sucked his bottom lip and her blood into his mouth, his eyes, having captured hers again, never wavering. She was forever wondering, in the aftermath, why she did it; why she raised her bleeding thumb to his lips; why she gasped when his tongue darted over her flesh...why she couldn't look away from his eyes. It should have been her that broke the moment; that pulled away. She would never know who it surprised more when it was him that cried out and pulled back, scrambling further into the corner he had hidden himself in.  
  
Reality came back to Dawn with a rush; and with it a sense that her body was in overdrive and that guilt was playing a major part for some unknown reason.  
  
"I'm sorry, Spike...please..."  
  
She trailed off as his own words reached her ears.  
  
"Mustn't hurt the girl...no...it burns...it burns...mustn't hurt the burn..."  
  
Dawn watched in fascinated horror as the Vampire's muscles tensed and his fists against his chest turned into claws...then he added four more red lines to the number just becoming visible on his chest. Dawn almost choked on her cry.  
  
"Spike no!"  
  
She pounced on him, heedless of the fact that she was, at that moment, attacking a certifiably insane vampire, and wrestled his hands away from his bloody chest. He fought half-heartedly, she could tell because she wasn't dead yet, until his body suddenly went limp and he fell forward into her. Dawn oofed lightly as she landed on her backside, her arms automatically coming around the quaking vampire whose head was buried in her shoulder. For a moment she simply sat, her eyes wide as she attempted to make sense of the situation and the trembling vampire in her arms...she could do neither and found, to her surprise, she really didn't want to as Spike gripped her almost painfully, shaking and murmuring into her shoulder.  
  
"Make them be quiet burn; make me be quiet...stay and help me be quiet."  
  
There was a desperation in his voice that grappled with her common sense that was telling her to get the hell out; a desperation that held her in place and guided her hand up and into the vampires mussed hair.  
  
"Shh...Spike, I'm not going anywhere..."  
  
"...help me be quiet..."  
  
"I'll help you be quiet Spike...shh..."  
  
She didn't know whether it was her voice or the fingers trailing through his hair that did it, but gradually the vampire in her arms calmed enough to relax his bruising grip on her and shift his weight so that his head rested in her lap. Dawn sighed as her hand found his and he gripped her fingers tightly, imitating his hold on the leg of her pants. Her fingers traced light patterns through his hair as she leaned back against the crate and closed her eyes.  
  
Well, she had wanted to find a corner...she had never specified her solitude.  
  
-----------------------------------------  
  
AN - Let me know if I should continue or keep it as a vignette ay? I'm all with the indecision. 


End file.
